Monday, June 20, 2011

Appropriately enough, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan were well matched mentally, yet they displayed an appropriate stylistic contrast. Earthy, squat, and pugnacious, Mailer possessed all the hot qualities McLuhan attributed to print culture. Meanwhile, McLuhan adopted the cerebral and cavalier cool approach he credited to successful television politicians like John F. Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau, who responded to attacks with insouciant indifference.

Early on in the program, McLuhan and Mailer tackle the largest possible issue, the fate of nature:

McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

One of her “big ideas” was that the sickness of the modern world is caused by “uprootedness.” We are, Simone Weil believed, lost. The only antidote is a social order grounded in physical labor. Only manual work can save us.

Weil herself was preternaturally a worker by brain, not by hand. Small, myopic, physically awkward and weak, it is difficult to think of anyone less suited to toil in a factory, workshop or field. Weil was a French intellectual of the purest sort. Considered a prodigy from childhood alongside her brother Andre, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians, she had mastered classical Greek by age twelve, was steeped in advanced mathematical physics by fifteen and at twenty came top in the entrance exam to the super-elite École Normale Supérieure. That was the same year, 1928, that Simone de Beauvoir had finished second.

Part philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”

Is This It? Mass Rioting, Civil Unrest In Greece As Economists Warn Of Global 'Armageddon Scenarios'!

As protesters continue to run riot in the streets, economists are warning that the whole of Europe and by extension, the rest of the world could face financial armageddon should Greece default on its debt, in the absence of a second bailout.

Financial experts are warning of a 'Lehman Moment' as the European markets are beginning to show signs of unraveling in the wake of the Greek crisis.

"The markets have moved from simply pricing in a high probability of a Greek debt default to looking at a scenario of it becoming disorderly and of contagion spreading to other economies like Portugal, like Ireland, and maybe Spain, Italy and Belgium." a former UK Treasury official told Bloomberg news.

Many European countries and banks currently hold billions in Greek debt, meaning that a Greek default will act like a virus throughout Europe.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, Spanish banks currently hold $600 million in Greek debt, Italian banks hold $2.6 billion, UK banks hold $3.2 billion, French banks hold $19.8 billion, German banks hold $26.3 billion and other Eurozone countries hold a combined total of around $15.7 billion in Greek debt.

US banks also hold $1.8 billion in Greek debt and Japanese banks hold $500 million in Greek debt.

The euro has declined by more than 2 percent against the already vastly devalued dollar within the past two days. Equities declined around the world, while corporate bond protection costs soared to their highest level since January. There is now an estimated 78 percent chance that Greece will not pay its debts.

Four of Greece's largest banks have been downgraded by Standard & Poor's, while Moody's Investors Service said it may downgrade BNP Paribas SA and two other big French banks owing to the amount of Greek debt they hold.

A worldwide market freeze on the scale of that seen in 2008 following the collapse of Lehman is looking increasingly likely. Such a scenario would send shockwaves through currencies, money markets, equities and derivatives globally.

The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, is seeking a parliamentary vote on a 78 billion-euro ($110 billion) program of austerity cuts and asset sales. The EU and the IMF have announced that the program must be passed by the end of the month in order that the country can receive "funds disbursement".

Should such a motion not pass, "Armageddon scenarios come into play, which include default and potentially the whole contagion scenario plays out." Charles Diebel, head of market strategy at Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets in London, wrote in a note to clients yesterday.

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Roots

Revelation 13

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy...

...And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?...

Mark 13

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.